ALEXANDER RODGER
(1784-1846)

FEW CAN GROVEL like the coarse-grained Scottish gentry when there’s English royalty about. When George IV came to have a look at his Scottish subjects in 1822, Sir Walter Scott was out there showing himself off with a nauseating display of buttering up called, ‘Carle, Now the King’s Come’. To show that the voice of the people, in the language of the people, will always sound the truest note, the Glasgow poet, Sandy Rodger, composed this magnificent send-up of Scott, ‘Sawney, Now the King’s Come’, which, we are told, outraged Scott’s sense of loyalty. Scott was, after all, stage managing George IV’s coronation visit north - the first Prince of the House of Hanover to set foot in Scotland since ‘the butcher Cumberland’ ran amuck at Culloden. When Scott rowed out to the royal yacht anchored in the Roads of Leith, the King welcomed him on board, ‘the man in Scotland I most wish to see’, and drank the poet’s health in a bumper of malt whiskey. Scott begged to be allowed to keep the ‘precious vessel’ that had touched the royal cake-hole. Being granted this boon, he tucked it away in his coat-tail pocket and, as you’ve no doubt guessed, it wasn’t too long before the priceless crystal was just splinters in his arse. Although the author of ‘Waverley’ let out the most awful scream, as Lockhart informs us in his typically complacent way, ‘the scar was of no great consequence’. But as a memorial to a King’s toast on the quarter-deck of the Royal George, it was certainly something. The only pity is, Sandy Rodger didn’t know about it. ‘Sawney, Now the King’s Come’ might have had at least one extra sample of the ridiculousness of bourgeois Edinburgh in 1822.